Toy aisles are like Hollywood — every year there are more young faces and fewer of the old ones. There’s the new blood: Arthur, the Teletubbies, Bear in the Big Blue House, Pokémon, and Blue and her clues. Then come the middle-aged toys: the residents of Sesame Street, a Muppet…
I am Vlad the Impaler, Joe Eszterhas’ penis. You know Joe, right? Bigfoot-looking son of a bitch, like Jerry Garcia after he swallowed Brian Wilson on an Acapulco Gold high? The guy who wrote Basic Instinct and Showgirls and Flashdance and a whole lotta crap for which he was paid…
There are many, many productive paths a bright, ambitious young fellow can pursue in America. He can, for instance, start a mediocre rock band and try to make music for beer commercials. He can also design a Web site to advertise Web sites about Web sites. Or there’s always the…
It’s a pleasure to say that Clint Eastwood reverses his recent downward slide –A Perfect World (1993), The Bridges of Madison County (1995), Absolute Power (1997), and True Crime (1999), each of which has seemed less satisfying than its predecessor–with Space Cowboys, his latest. It isn’t an especially profound film,…
To hell with PETA: They really should test producer Jerry Bruckheimer’s movies on animals before releasing them. Just unleashing them into theaters every few months seems so unhealthy, like spraying pesticide into the water supply or selling decaying fish to Chinese restaurants and calling it “pork.” Every few months, a…
Honestly now, have you, of late, found yourself enthralled by pleasing stimuli? Please, no nauseating responses like “Aromatherapy shifts my reality” or “After I get rolfed, my heart is more open to love.” Instead, think of the good, serendipitous stuff, the random intoxicants that bombard your subcutaneous organs. For example,…
In 1995, a former Jesuit priest and scholar in Eastern languages published a religious study that has since become indispensable to Christians, agnostics, and pagans alike–a book that undertook a witty, irreverent, somewhat distant, but astringently observant investigation of all the sex, blood, pestilence, smiting, betrayal, and vengeance in the…
Words like “amazing” and “wondrous” have been so overused that now they’re just a tad more meaningful than “neat” or “cool.” The boss’ new haircut isn’t merely nice, it’s fabulous. A fancy meal doesn’t just taste good, it’s spectacular. The words are cheapened, making it much more difficult to sound…
Sometimes it’s downright difficult to live in Dallas. The heat, pollution, and traffic are out of control. People don’t trust the city government. And, darn it, there’s just no place to shop. But keep your chin up: There is hope. In the name of research and goodwill, we sacrificed an…
Mike White, the writer and star of Chuck & Buck, has grown a little weary of all the intense scrutiny from writers who interview him for the film. But he’s sensible enough to know that it’s part of the press drill for a hot indie property. He also understands why…
The bewildering penchant of recent American movies for glorifying the lovable naïf, the perpetual adolescent, and the village idiot takes a strange new turn in Miguel Arteta’s dark comedy Chuck & Buck. Arteta’s hero, Buck O’Brien (Mike White), is a 27-year-old man-child who eats lollipops all day, takes refuge in…
For one moment–and that’s all you can stomach–really look at Eddie Murphy’s filmography. You will notice how his bad films (and most transcend that feeble definition, falling more often into the “wretched” category) far outweigh the good. You will see that those few good films–Murphy’s Holy Trinity of Funny: 48…
It’s a premise that’s bound to succeed. A young man living on the edge is trying to pull it all together while frequenting 12-step programs and holding down a job that seems calculated to drive him insane. Searching for a way out, he makes contact with a mysterious figure who…
All you dumb asses who attend a Pocket Sandwich Theatre show with the desire to disorder the performers by pelting them with popcorn, beware: The actors have a unique opportunity for revenge in 20,000 Babes Beneath the Sea, and they seize it. I won’t reveal it here, but let’s just…
Someone once said, “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.” (Obviously, that someone was French–specifically, it was epicure Anthelme Brillat-Savarin.) He could just as well have made the same proclamation on how we eat. Do we regularly dine off of ornate, specialized china placed…
It’s a shock when you reach adulthood and realize that you’re not yet done with Shakespeare, that you didn’t leave him padlocked in your bologna-sandwich-smelling high-school locker or folded in a dog-eared college lit text at the campus bookstore. He’s out here in the grown-up world too. He waits at…
It’s tempting to think there’s something twisted about her tale. After all, she was a mere 18 the first time she had sex in front of a camera–for money, small change that would soon enough blossom into a pile of cash–and did so only at the insistence of her boyfriend,…
Well, I lost a thumb on the Fourth of July / I ran into my mother and she started to cry / She looked at the label on that M-80 and she wiped the tears from her eyes / She said the Chinese we are not to trust / They…
In the course of two hours, Neil Gaiman speaks 10,000 words (or damned near, when transcribed), and it seems a shame to waste a single one, since there is not an uh or y’know among them. Even the most eloquent writer gets lost in thought every now and then…uh…y’know? But…
Rather than asking if this senseless and expensive new film from wunderkind entertainer Robert Zemeckis is devoid of merit (it is), or “worth seeing” (it isn’t), we should instead take the movie’s title–What Lies Beneath–as a direct question. Indeed, what does lie beneath? Possible answers include: a glaringly improbable shift…
Twelve hours after seeing Loser, the only thing I could remember about it was Alan Cumming’s performance of “Willkommen” from the 1998 Broadway production of Cabaret–which isn’t technically even in the movie, since the scene is obviously spliced in to make it appear as though the film’s two would-be lovebirds…
Here’s my final report from the Second Annual Festival of Independent Theatres. Taken with last week’s review, I hope it will give an accurate account of the scope and ambition of a city event that has risen to eminence in a very short time: Echo Theatre revives a one-act by…
